This disclosure relates generally to analyzing tracking requests received by an online system from client devices rendering web pages received from a website, and in particular to determining accuracy of the information provided by client devices via tracking requests to an online system.
Online systems such as social networking systems track user interactions with the online system so that they can provide features and content that is relevant to each user. The online system logs user interactions with the online system for analysis. However, online systems also prefer to monitor user interactions with external systems such as third party websites. An online system may not have direct access to logs of the external website. However, a client device can send a tracking request to the online system describing user interactions between the client device and the external website.
An external website provides instructions with the web page that are executed by the client device when the client device renders the web page. These instructions cause the tracking request to be generated for sending information to the online system. However, sometimes external websites provide inaccurate data (e.g., label the web page incorrectly or report the wrong event, fail to label the web page at all, report duplicate events, etc.). This may happen due to defects in the instructions provided by a web page to the client device for generating the tracking requests. Conventional techniques fail to detect such errors in the information reported by client devices via tracking requests. As a result, a client device provides inaccurate information to the online system. Any analysis performed by the online system based on such inaccurate data reported by a client device is inaccurate and results in the online system making incorrect inferences and taking wrong actions based on the inferences, for example, sending irrelevant content to a user.